International Women's Day! Webinar!

Today I was one of the four Casa students to attend the Webinar about Maternal Mortality and whatnot, so I thought I’d share my take on it for the rest of the people who might have been interested.

The powerpoint brought up some really interesting statistics, and the women were stressing that these were only approximations, and that in reality numbers of deaths were probably much higher.

But what was truly mind-boggling to me was that, we, as America, pledged to donate a certain amount of money each year to help women worldwide with education, contraceptives, medical care, etc; but we have barely paid any of what we promised we would. Of course, most of the payment was supposed to have happened during Bush’s Administration. There was no economic crisis until 2008, so we had no real monetary excuse. The Bush Administration’s excuse? That all the money was funding abortions, a practice which is typically disliked by conservatives. But the women clarified that the money would help lower the abortion rate in the first place, and they said that every investigation into this claim showed that little, if any money, was for abortions.

Obviously in our financial crisis at the moment, we don’t exactly have excess money to make up for the seven years of funding we failed to produce. However, Obama is trying to steadily increase the amount of money to organizations like these. But that money isn’t going to magically appear, and there are always other causes people will see as more important. And health care in our own country isn’t so fabulous that we can focus on international health issues (not that I don’t think they are EXTREMELY important.)

African American women are 4 times more likely due to complications in childbirth. 4 times. Some parts of cities in the United States are nearing 3rd world country status. And yet health care debates are about whether or not women have the right to abortion. How about we all, Americans, Nigerians, Indians, Nicaraguans, Bangladeshi, we all just have the right to survive a pregnancy, accidental or not?